How to find outdated projects?

[Hans-Hermann Hunfeld]

In order to keep our instance clean as possible we would like to archive old/outdated projects. Unfortunately many project managers don t tell us about their finished projects so we need to have an option to find them on our own.

As example we could simply check for the latest update of any issue inside a project and in case it s older than 3 (or 6 or whatever) months we can ask the according project lead. Right now i do not have an idea how to get this info as i would have to check each project separatly or i have to search manually in a big list, both not smart. Anybody an idea how to handle this usecase?

Thanks & regards,
Hans-Hermann

[Mike Bertelsen]

I wrote a query to look for issues that had no updates for 6 months:

updated <= -182d AND category is EMPTY AND resolution is EMPTY ORDER BY updated DESC, key DESC

However it is still a manual process to then go and see which projects are truly idle.

[Hans-Hermann Hunfeld]

Hi Mike, thanks for your answer, but your filter will only get outdated issues instead outdated projects! As example a long running project has some issues which fits to your filter, but there could be many other issues which are not that old... Or do i get something wrong?

[Mike Bertelsen]

No you have it. That is why it is a manual process. However at the time you run the base query and you find projects in the query that are still active, you can modify the base query to exclude known active projects until only inactive projects remain. It has helped me to identify idle projects that after contacting the owners I was able to then delete the project or give them a year for reference in read only mode.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yup, you can only search for issues. Projects are not issues. But that's the sort of query that gets you started on your housekeeping!

[Hans-Hermann Hunfeld]

Maybe we´ll try something direct on the DB, think of last updated issues of each project...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Sadly, you're spot on, there's no easy way to do this, you have to check each project separately.

I wrote a housekeeping report which helps with it because it exposes most of the helpful information in one page, but it's still missing a couple of fields (the most important ones) and I've never got round to upgrading it past Jira 3.

[Hans-Hermann Hunfeld]

Hmm, the good thing is that i do not seem to oversee something... ;)

Maybe i ve to ask our database experts for some glory queries, but this problem should also impact other admins...